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coondoggie writes "NASA will this week demonstrate its lunar robot rover equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon. NASA said the engineering challenge of building such as drilling system was daunting because a robot rover designed for prospecting within lunar craters has to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.The project is just one demonstration of the collaboration NASA is utilizing to bring together its next moon shot. For example, Carnegie Mellon was responsible for the robot's design and testing, and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology built the drilling system. NASA's Glenn Research Center contributed the rover's power management system. NASA's Ames Research Center built a system that navigates the rover in the dark. The Canadian Space Agency funded a Neptec camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light, NASA said."

Good question. I'm more interested in if they're going to ask observers to wear "alien" costumes while they film it. A few years from now, after the "landing" on the moon, they show their footage of the moon "landing" with the "aliens" who happened to be there and tell Congress that they need more money to investigate these "aliens". After all, NASA has learned their lesson from the first fake...I mean the first landing.

Dude, give it up. That was the worst attempt at trolling I've ever seen. If you want aliens you need to go to my journal [slashdot.org]. Well actually that one's not a good example, the alien is only mentioned in passing. It's more about alcohol and drugs and violence and attempted murder and what's worse, shooting pool. The entry from last year titled Alien Invader [slashdot.org] would be more to your liking.

I called the cops on the alien. The stupid alien almost got hauled off to jail.

I know this is just flamebait but... The lunar landing can be fairly easily proven irrefutably from earth. When they were up there they left behind laser reflecting arrays. What those do is you point a laser at it and it reflects the laser back directly at you. So people with a powerful laser and telescope can pick it up easily enough. As well the americans were in a space race with the russians, HAD the us faked it why would the russians not call them on it? It made them look like crap and they easily had the tech to check. Also lunar rocks if you have taken 1st yr chem are pretty irrefutable.

No, it's not "flamebait". The joke about the lunar landing being faked has been a running joke here on/. for a while. The lunar landing being faked is as outrageous as all of us are really inhabited by alien life forces or that all of us are decedents from just two people.

I guess my sense of humor isn't shared by others. I wish I could just post a fart or something. That seams to be the standard of humor these days.

Nahhhh you are the product of an egg and a sperm falling in love. I supposed technically you were really given life by dna polymerase. But then again if you realllly think about it its just nucleic acid. Then again the business end of nucleic acid is really just a few nucleotides. But the business end of that is either purine or pyrimidine. And if you think about it they are just like 10 or so atoms. Which are really just a collection of quarks. Atleast thats how i explain why i was born strange, yet charmi

Wider than a mile
I'm crossing you in style someday
You dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you're going I'm going your way
Two drifters off to see the world
Theres such a lot of world to see
Were after the same rainbows end
Waiting round the band
My huckleberry friend, Moon Rover
And me

It's an article in Network World, but there's no mention of the hardware or OS/software they've used for this robotic rover. The technical details are sparse for a supposedly technical publication. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's interested in knowing more beyond this broad overview.

I don't know about extracting H2, and O2, but since Regolith is a pain the ass for the astronauts I'm thinking a rover could be sent to blast away a nice work area for them to arrive and have a regolith free area to set up their moonbase. I'm no rocket scientist though.

And what your you using to blast with? I'm sorry, but your leaf blower doesn't work very efficiently at 10^-12 torr. You could use something similar to the ascend rockets they used on the lunar module (that set off the dust clouds that set of the "fake, fake" cries), but the regolith is several feet deep, so you need one hell of a blast there. You're actually better off to coat large areas with a very thin layer of binder, and keep the dust down that way.

I don't think blast charges oxidize with the atmosphere do they? Doesn't seem like that would mix fast enough. Torpedoes don't seem to have any trouble. As for regolith, "Portable antitank weapons have become more powerful, more reliable, and more available worldwide since the early 1980s. Many of these weapons are capable of penetrating 20 to 40 inches of armor plate steel" (cite [state.nv.us]). For that matter, anything that gets all the way from the earth to the moon is going to arrive with plenty of momentum. Maybe they could just drop a DU rod out of the probe before initiating deceleration for the landing?

The problem with mechanical impacting is that that's how you got the dust in the first place, meteorite impacts. If you impact hard enough to leave a decent size crater you generate enough dust to cover the surface up again. As for your portable anti tank weapon, that's based on a hollow charge, it's exactly the wrong type of explosive. You want something that sets free a large amount of gas to push the regolith out of the way, not something that's build to concentrate all its energy in a very fast chunk

Not enough sugar in the coffee this morning? The issues of drilling on the moon are nothing you've ever seen on earth, and none are related to the lower gravity.
A few facts (I know, you don't bother with them):
Your surface temperature fluctuates from -220 C to + 110 C, with 150 C difference being a good guess for most locations. There are no lubricants that will work over that range, and none that work at -220 C.
You have no atmosphere to cool your drill motor, or blow the highly abrasive regolith dust off your seals and bearings.
You can't drill using the standard slurry approach to move your debris out of the hole.
Your nearest spare parts are 300,000 miles away, and there's no one to loosen that lug nut.
You have a very limited power supply from solar cells, and any dust you allow to get on the cells you will not be able to remove.
For an easy challenge, try digging a hole in the middle of the Antarctic plateau, middle of winter, with a golf cart full of supplies, and a 5 kW generator for power. Remotely controlled.

Funny that you mention drilling and hurdles. Drilling requires a platform which should be (as other posters pointed out) heavy and low to the ground. Hurdles, as in boulders, are much easier to handle with lighter vehicles with plenty of ground clearance (so they can "Get over it"). So here we have two key requirements that are fundamentally at odds with one another, that's just one of the many reasons "this is so hard!"

FYI, the way Scarab solves the problem is with a nice combination of pitch averagi

So the truth comes out! They are planning a rover mission, but just in case their math fails to match up and the rover ends up crashing on the moon, they will just say they were searching for hydrogen [slashdot.org].

I hope the folks who work on the various rovers get together periodically and exchange ideas -- a standard data bus, a secure common operating system, reuse of algorithms, joint testing of components... could save time, money, and mistakes.

I hope the folks who work on the various rovers get together periodically and exchange ideas -- a standard data bus, a secure common operating system, reuse of algorithms, joint testing of components... could save time, money, and mistakes.

Believe me, the Microsoft OSes weren't on my short list. I was just envisioning having a couple of RTOS and OS choices with common goals, a well-administered stable version for each, with drivers and the like controlled pretty strictly.

That is indeed the case on the autonomy side (ie, follow the mission plan without hitting anything). Most of the ideas and code have evolved through Life in the Atacama a few years ago. In many cases they were developed (either in the design or programming sense) earlier and really hit their stride on that project.

I think that with the moon's lower gravity you could get away with hauling much more weight in batteries.

Look up the cost of shipping a kilo of mass to the Moon before you say that. Every kilo used up by a battery adds to the launch cost, and is a kilo not used up by a scientific instrument. And there's a hard upper limit: there are no Saturn-class launchers in the world today, so the whole payload cannot exceed the capacity of the largest Delta Heavy in the inventory.

The counterweight issue could be resolved with a Katamari strategy. Granted, it would unproductive weight, but it would work. The next step would be adding a Mr. Fusion to the rover, so that it could process what ever it scooped up into fuel.

It's hard to beat the energy & power density of internal combustion engines. Since there is no air, your propellant is heavier, since you'd need to carry the oxidizer, but I suspect that you'd still have an advantage in range. In The Case for Mars [amazon.com] Robert Zubrin has proposed internal combustion Mars rovers that could use CO2 as an oxidizer. (I forget what the fuel is, but it can be made from methane derived from local CO2 and hydrogen.) Also, in the book The Rocket Company [hobbyspace.com] an automaker funds a trip to the moon where they use a modified SUV carrying its own oxidizer.

...so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable

I assume here they are referring to either: 1) The problem of the drill staying still and the rover rotating around it. 2) Downward force on the drill lifting the rover up.

With conventional earth-bound drilling these problem are solved in the case of 1: by using multiple counter-rotating bits and in the case of 2: Auger bits, which both remove material and bite into the material at the bottom of the hole with a screw, pulling themselves downward without requiring downward pressure on the drill.

I would certainly think that counter-rotating heads would work on the moon, though use of an auger might depend on the material properties of moon rock.

Good points, however I think the issue that they are talking about is starting the drilling, not problems in drilling.
Mind you, given the fact that I've met junior/senior EE majors from a good US college (that will remain nameless) who cannot tell a resistor from a diode, maybe they don't know what the issues are, or how to go about solving them. The motto seems to be all too much like, if we can graduate you without you having to do anything other than play with simulators (that are presumed perfect) the

Two problems, the regolith is about the the consistency of flour (somewhere in the 50 micron particle size). So you basically are trying to drill a hole in a flour silo, without being able to us the walls for support. It's also highly abrasive, and you're drilling dry, with the bits at rather low temperature (enhancing the brittleness of the drill bit).

They were there, theres a picture of a boot print on the concrete lunar surface next to the lander to prove it.
And,
Their second choice of a drill was to include just the boot Neil Armstrong used so they could stomp their way below the lunar surface.

The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.

I really tire of all the sensationlism that needs to be tied to everything. Give me a break. This problem has been solved so many times it's not even funnny. How many helicopters which essentially have 0 gravitational force to keep them straight do you see spinning out of control? And that's a complex solution. I think ships anchors are a pretty old tech that's bee

The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.

I really tire of all the sensationlism that needs to be tied to everything. Give me a break. This problem has been solved so many times it's not even funnny.

Right - then why don't you provide some solutions that work rather than handwaving nonsense?

How many helicopters which essentially have 0 gravitational force to keep them straight do you see spinning out of control?

Helicopters provide counter revolution forces in a wide variety of way, precisely none of which will work on the rover.

I think ships anchors are a pretty old tech that's been around a while. How about firing a few pilons into the ground for anchorage.

For the first, anchors are heavy - and spare weight allowance isn't something the rover has. For the second, how do drive the pitons without encountering the very problems you are driving the pitons to resist?

It isn't nearly as simply as you make out.

A group of 5th graders can solve this.

Everything is easy when all you have to do is handwave. It gets rather harder when you actually have to do it.

Indeed, helicopters provide counter revolution in many ways. All of which don't rely on an atmosphere to work. In the end its all just angular velocity you need to counter, and you certainly could do it on a rover. The point of bringing up a helicopter is simply that if its been solved for an extremely complex system like that, then the moon in comparison is pretty simplistic. It can all be figured out using freshman physics.

Anchors are only heavy because they need to travel 'far' in a decent amount of tim

Solving it in freshman physics has very little to do with solving it with real world hardware that can built within the constraints of time, mass, volume, budget, reliability, etc...

Anchors are only heavy because they need to travel 'far' in a decent amount of time. The weight isn't there to help stop the boat, it's there to get to the bottom before you drift away from where you want to be.

Absolutely...Since helicopters use atmospheric resistance to maneuver, those tactics don't apply to the Moon, with virtually no atmosphere to use for the tail rotor to counteract tourque. Bzzzt! Wrong answer!

Firing pitons into the Moon to hold the rover down for drilling makes sense except for two points:

- Drilling operations will be limited by how many pitons you carry, and how the firing mechanism works. This also adds weight and defeats the 'lightweight' requirement.

The point was simply that the article makes this sound like it's some monumental feat to overcome. It simply isn't. It's been solved many times in many different scenarios. A reduced gravity does not affect the physics of negating angular velocity. Sorry, i'm long past the point where the potential to grow a crystal in space excites me. And this isn't exactly the kind of problem that makes me marvel either.

Getting there is a marvel, landing is a marvel. I'll even give them the fact that they can drive this

Well, then, damn! I oughta get a bunch of guys together and wrangle up a rover of our own.The frame and propulsion doesn't worry me. Guts out of any cheap digital camera, with a USB bus for everything, and just a hardened RS6000 would do. I know a guy who could mod an OS for us. He'll learn all the lessons from the Mars rover project, let me tell you.

Now all we need is a 65,000 liter Coke bottle.

Seriously, we aren't that far from DIY exploration, are we? The hardest part seems the radio back to Earth.

Here ya go: http://www.hssensorsystems.com/hsc/proddesc_display/0,10401,CLI1_DIV25_ETI5338_PRD736,00.html [hssensorsystems.com]
This is actually for the shuttle, the ISS uses the Russian shitter. We do however make the EMU, water processor which is used on the what goes into the toilet, ogygen generator which takes said water and produces oxygen and other environmental systems. The water is actually drinkable, but for the most part the still drink what's brought up to them.

First, the proposed mission is not spec'd to drive down into the crater, which is likely to have very steep walls covered in loose soil. That descent would be very risky, and so I believe the current mission concept is to land inside the crater, which is permanently dark and cold at about -170 C. Even if you could drive down into the crater, the issues of the mass and reliability of a tether on the order of 10km (Shackleton is 19km wide and 1km deep) are definite problems.

It seems to be a NASA ritual to get ordered to do one thing & focus on the crust instead. So they're putting all this effort into hypothetical lunar science experiments & drawing pictures of manned habitats while ignoring the minor expensive detail of the rocket to get there. Haven't seen any progress on Ares V for years since they got ordered to put a number of basic science missions back on the budget.

I agree. Isn't there an easier solution?I was thinking that you could set off small explosions in the regolith and observe the spectrum emitted to determine the elements present. No need for wheels, drills, or landing systems. Just a few hundred high explosive projectiles, a telescope with a spectrometer on an orbiter and three hundred grad students back on earth to crunch the data.

Well... Those NASA people are pretty smart. I'm sure there's a reason they're going this route.

So we've already done one impact test with Lunar Prospector and plan to do a higher energy test with LCROSS and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (in fact there's a./ article a bit further down the front page right now). But the question of water on the moon has been an open one for quite some time, with no definitive answer. The theory is that ice from cometary impacts will have collected at the lunar poles which are permanently dark and cold. The Clementine mission's radar data suggested pockets of ice an

I'll grant that it's very dark on the dark side of the moon, but without the convection an atmosphere provides, how cold will it actually be? The only heat loss will be through radiation and what (I imagine little) conduction there is between the rover and the ground. If a vacuum keeps my coffee in my thermos hot, how will it be any different on the moon?

IANARS, but I would think a bigger problem would be keeping the thing from overheating.